I think my position is unique to others. A year after I started, my wife and I had our first child, so ensuring we had a stable and steady stream of income was my priority above all else.
Along with that, the company I work for has been good to me through the years. I've enjoyed working with my co-workers and the projects I work on. While I may be able to make more working for another company, I do think that the atmosphere and ethos of a company bring a certain amount of value that I would be trading off. I may be wrong, but I have no reason to think otherwise at this point.
I've always been self-taught, and always tried to be working on something on the side, so I believe that has allowed me to keep up with changes and try new things to scratch my itch of not being complacent.
When I first started working at my full-time job, I was the only developer working on my project and was entrusted with choosing the stack I felt could get the job done. It felt very early start-up in that sense. Shortly after that, I began working on another product that I'm still working on today, and wrote the main components in Go and some back office parts in PHP. To help support me being the sole dev, we had a few other devs come in and rewrite the majority of the components in Java because back in 2013, Go wasn't as widely used as it was today.
I'm thankful that for the most part I've always been able to choose the tech or libraries I want to work with, within reason. I try not to push it too much, for example we use MySQL and Redis primarily for data storage and transient storage, but part of our app does use Mongo and that was a direct result of me trying to hop on the bandwagon early on that I now do regret because Mongo provides us no benefit over MySQL.
If I do want to use some obscure tech to test out, then I'll use it for my own projects. If I feel comfortable enough then I'll use that for my client projects as well. Only if it's something I've battle tested will I see if I can use it in my primary job.
For the first time in 5+ years I am not developing a client side-project in PHP or Go, I'll be using Ruby on Rails, because I'm at the point that the stability of the toolset and my productivity outweigh any performance gains that may be had with Go, and these projects are primarily back office that won't be doing a ton of data crunching or have more than a dozen users using it at a single point in time.
Along with that, the company I work for has been good to me through the years. I've enjoyed working with my co-workers and the projects I work on. While I may be able to make more working for another company, I do think that the atmosphere and ethos of a company bring a certain amount of value that I would be trading off. I may be wrong, but I have no reason to think otherwise at this point.
I've always been self-taught, and always tried to be working on something on the side, so I believe that has allowed me to keep up with changes and try new things to scratch my itch of not being complacent.
When I first started working at my full-time job, I was the only developer working on my project and was entrusted with choosing the stack I felt could get the job done. It felt very early start-up in that sense. Shortly after that, I began working on another product that I'm still working on today, and wrote the main components in Go and some back office parts in PHP. To help support me being the sole dev, we had a few other devs come in and rewrite the majority of the components in Java because back in 2013, Go wasn't as widely used as it was today.
I'm thankful that for the most part I've always been able to choose the tech or libraries I want to work with, within reason. I try not to push it too much, for example we use MySQL and Redis primarily for data storage and transient storage, but part of our app does use Mongo and that was a direct result of me trying to hop on the bandwagon early on that I now do regret because Mongo provides us no benefit over MySQL.
If I do want to use some obscure tech to test out, then I'll use it for my own projects. If I feel comfortable enough then I'll use that for my client projects as well. Only if it's something I've battle tested will I see if I can use it in my primary job.
For the first time in 5+ years I am not developing a client side-project in PHP or Go, I'll be using Ruby on Rails, because I'm at the point that the stability of the toolset and my productivity outweigh any performance gains that may be had with Go, and these projects are primarily back office that won't be doing a ton of data crunching or have more than a dozen users using it at a single point in time.